February 10, 2009

I give a balanced description, and Big Tent Democrat decides I must be insulting Obama, then a clutter of dimwitted followers in the comments proceed to react as if I'd written BTD's slanted paraphrase. Finally, a commenter named Teresa questions the interpretation:

When I first read it, I thought she was making fun of Bush play acting like "I'm the President." How he always acted so proud of himself even when we were making fun of him. Maybe you're right, though.

47 comments:

I think they struggle to understand a lot of things over there at TalkLeft. For all their professed love of intelligence, lefties sure seem to have a difficult time with nuance and complexity.

Did you notice how everyone who defended Obama's performance in the press conference thread last night said one or the other variation of "it sure is nice to have a President who speaks in complete sentences!" Not much about the substance of those sentences, mostly because there was no substance to those sentences. Lefties seem easily impressed by the appearance of intelligence. But when the greatest praise that they can muster is "he's better than George W. Bush!" or "he can form a complete sentence!", well... I think we all need to worry.

I stopped reading at TalkLeft once it became clear that most of the posts were merely personal insults about Althouse.

And that occurred rather quickly.

Their confidence in the situation is pretty thin when they react to stray comments this way, as if she were the only one in the audience who wouldn't clap because she believed in fairies, and Tinkerbama wouldn't live after all.

It's to your credit that the commenters at TalkLeft cannot understand you.

They are perplexed by independent thinking and analysis. You provide both in abundance.

Your commenters deserve, well, comment as well. Many of your commenters did not support the Obama candidacy, yet most were clear in wishing him well as president. I doubt the same sentiment would have been found on TalkLeft had John McCain been elected president.

It's like they have talking points and were told to go to "the blogs" and repeat them. Of course lots of people also said they liked the speech, but couldn't understand what Obama was talking about, also as if repeating a talking point. It would be funny if many of the posts were written by Democratic and Republican plants.

I'm a traditional Conservative boycotter of the GOP. I argue with many on the Left.

Without someone in the past to point fingers to,or someone today to mock, they have essentially NOTHING to say.

Other than getting and holding onto power, I can't figure out what it is they aspire to. I know they claim several things:

Anti-Racism: But if you're in one of hte protected groups and refuse to be on the Left, the Left uses all the ugliness of Racism against them

Anti-Bush/GOP-Drunk-Sailor-Type-Spending: The only they were against is that they weren't writting the spending bills. They have no problem endebting the US further to China. They have not gienv any thought of if China even wants to loan us more money. THey have no consideration of what is going to happen to the US Dollar

Imperial Executive: Obama is appointing unprecedented number of "Czars" to bypass the Senate-involved Cabinet appointment system.

Tolerance: The Left is the opposite of that

Anti-"Bush is Silencing Dissent": Bush never did that... but look at what Obamais doing .. calling out by name people in private sector who should be ostracsized! News networks that are critical of him!! Now their political party launches campaigns against private people.

Can you imagine if Republicans did this?

Ok, so they're not actually for any of that stuff above...

It's all about power.. it's all about controling all of our lives.

We're under assault and our Liberty is at risk from this Obama - Reid - Pelosi tryanny.

With coming collapse of the US Dollar, people need to think in terms of the basics.. existentially. People need to consider that it's possible there will not be a Federal Govt in 2012. or there will not be 50 Sovereign States in Federation but instead a tyrannical Union.

National Health Care would be the biggest assault on American Liberty.. EVER.

The same people who think the NSA listening in to phone calls to maniacs in Pakistan is the same thing as eavesdropping on their (the dissenters) phone sex (which the NSA does anyway. big deal)

want us to submit from birth to death to Government institutions that will handle our most intimate and private biology and development. And not only that, that the Govt choose how to ration this service and therefore our very physical well being is subject to a political process and the corruption that infects it.

Our Constitution is dead if this thing ever comes... well it's dead already.

The Left wants the tentacles of Government all over us.. regulating our every move , our every word, our every thought.

I found TalkLeft an interesting place to lurk during the primaries to read what the pro-Hillary Dems were up to, especially when so many of them went PUMA. Scouting the opposition, so to speak. It was usually entertaining, even if I often disagreed strongly with what they were saying. I didn't bother registering to comment there, because I would have quickly been banned.

However, many of the commenters there had strong cases of BDS. I knew this going in, and it helped me know which commenters to scroll past. Anybody writing anything about President Bush there suggesting him to be anything less than the Antichrist would have caused the other commenters to turn on the offender like a pack of rabid wolves.

So you also appear as a Maureen Dowd Democrat with really weird reaction to stuff in the eyes of these digital Revolutionaries. You had better stick to being an overbearing tree disguised as sensitive flower.I still eagerly await your Supreme Court appointment confirmation hearings, in which you have to explain yourself.They will still not appreciate an intellgence not committed to the Party Line, like Yuri Zhivago who would never give up on seeing the beauty of life.

The left has always been concerned more about appeareances than actual substance. Take Obama's Elkhart appearence yesterday. It was all about appearances because of those poor laid off RV workers.

Never mind that during campiagn season Obama railed against SUV owners and how we shouldn't drive them anymore but now that the economy is in the crapper, any laid off worker will do, even one from an environmentally unfriendly industry as RV manufacturers.

But make no mistake, no one from the media would dare question the irony of that.

I thought you were too hard on Obama last night. It's almost too easy to criticize him for being so "boring," but come on, you're a professor, and I'd think you could appreciate a boring professorial speech. But, I didn't see that final comment about Bush/Obama walking away as mean or critical, it was just sort of inane and meaningless.

Palladian said:For all their professed love of intelligence, lefties sure seem to have a difficult time with nuance and complexity.

Ah yes, and tell me again what you didn't like about the Obama press conference?

Obama had to do a sales job for his bailout, and a press conference let him get his message out to the people, with the minor penalty of being exposed to random questions that would drag him off-topic.

Answering questions, Obama made me think of someone tiptoeing through a minefield. But he made it.

now that the economy is in the crapper, any laid off worker will do, even one from an environmentally unfriendly industry as RV manufacturers.

Superficially, this criticism makes sense. But consider how the bulk of RV owners actually use their vehicles. Most of the ones I know drive them only one week (and a couple of weekends) a year. They do not take them more than a couple of hundred miles away, and when they get there, they use their regular cars to shuttle around.

Similarly, snowbirds drive south in winter and north in spring, staying put for the balanceof the time.

In contrast, SUV owners drive their fuel hogs every day.

RVs do take a lot of resources to build, but those are good things in terms of economic output. Further, since the market for giant RVs is limited to the US and Canada, the component and subassembly makers tend to be located here as well, easing our trade deficit.

Palladian said...I think they struggle to understand a lot of things over there at TalkLeft. For all their professed love of intelligence, lefties sure seem to have a difficult time with nuance and complexity.

That's because for the Left politics is their religion. There is Good and Evil, you're either With Them or Against Them.

Superficially, this criticism makes sense. But consider how the bulk of RV owners actually use their vehicles. Most of the ones I know drive them only one week (and a couple of weekends) a year. They do not take them more than a couple of hundred miles away, and when they get there, they use their regular cars to shuttle around.

Anecdotal to be sure. You're telling me that someone is driving a rolling house for only a couple hundred miles? And they only drive them a couple times a year? Quite an investment for so little use don't you think?

RVs do take a lot of resources to build, but those are good things in terms of economic output.

I actually own a small amount of stock in Winnebago. Some day I will use it light my campfire. Except I won't because it the stock is just a digital record. Stock issuers don't seem to print those beautiful paper documents anymore.

Former Law Student -- the RV thing goes along with the historic school building as perfectly illustrative of the fudge factor in Obama debt pacakge. It makes sense to give laid off workers a safety net as they look for new work. It doesn't make sense to bail out disfunctional companies -- or disfunctional states and cities. To do so is to turn the economy into a kind of wax museum of old ideas.

As for the TalkLeft broohaha, that illustrates, to me, the most boring blogging there is -- blogging about other bloggers. Here at Althouse, the commentaries were busy commenting about Obama, Bush, swagger, and pose. Over at TalkLeft they were sputtering about Althouse. God, how boring.

Cousin Eddie: It's a fine looking vehicle ain't it Clark?Clark: Yes Eddie. It looks so nice sitting in the driveway.Cousin Eddie: Well don't you go fallin in love with it cause we're taking it with us when we leave here next month.

Hoosier Daddy said..."I thought the whine about kids being taught in a school built in 1850 was priceless. Evidently President Genius isn't aware when the house he currently resides in was built."

Yep. Moreover, he connected his whine about the building's age to the concern that when a train passes it, all business has to stop because it's too loud. Why does he think that a modern building is inherently better soundproofed than an older building? Older buildings tend to be constructed from stone or brick; modern buildings are generally constructed from wood, sometimes with a thin brick facade. The former is more likely to resist incoming noise. Not far from where I sit, they're building a new federal courthouse right next to some train tracks, and having been in an older, sounder building a block away when a train passes, I promise you that proceedings will come to a deafened halt every time a train passes. The age of the building has nothing to do with it. Like so many of his statements, it's legerdemain: He says something and hopes his audience won't pay close attention or think critically.

LoneWhacko, do you think you could try either contributing productively, instead of hurling some insults at your host and then appropriating her blog to advertise your own, or else just shoving off? Practically everything you've posted here recently is either a whine that no one paid attention to you before, or a plea for attention now. Maybe if you built a reputation as a thoughtful commenter here, readers here would be more interested in reading your comments elsewhere.

Simon said He says something and hopes his audience won't pay close attention or think critically.

Well in his defense he did exactly that on the campaign trail for two years and got elected.

Think about it, he won the state of Pennsylvania, a state heavily dependent on the coal industry even though he essentially told them he'd do everything in his power to put them out of business in favor of windmills and unicorn powered energy plants.

...If one must repeat one's self, a five-second "Don't worry, we're going to make it fine," or "We've been through far worse together" is worth hundreds of long convuluted Chicken-Little riffs on "worst since the Great Depression", "catastrophe," and "impending disaster." Markets are not always rational, and, as reflections of human nature, they can be lectured into psychological depression....